Critic's Choice: New CDs

By JON PARELES

Published: April 9, 2007

Bright Eyes
''Cassadaga'' (Saddle Creek)

Excess helped make Conor Oberst endearing. As the singer and songwriter of Bright Eyes for a decade, he has been almost too sincere, too articulate, too sensitive, too self-conscious and too ambitious. Yet all that passion added up to a precocious charm. His willingness to detail every romance and reverie made him startlingly prolific and made his fans feel like confidants. But he's not a teenager from Nebraska anymore: he's a 27-year-old bandleader and one of indie rock's biggest stars. And he paused to think about it, which can be a mistake.

The first studio album by Bright Eyes since 2005, ''Cassadaga'' promises grand statements. Mr. Oberst is accompanied by an orchestra along with his band's dependable folk-rock. And he's thinking about religion, war, healing and ghosts, personal and historical. Cassadaga, Fla., is a town full of psychics, and the album starts with ''Clairaudients'': Backed by orchestral abstractions, telephone seers suggest visiting spiritual centers.

After that the music heads partway back toward roots-rock, though string and wind sections -- arranged by Nate Walcott, Bright Eyes' keyboardist -- might appear at any moment. Those arrangements can be exquisite, like the full-blown 1960's-style pop of ''Make a Plan to Love Me.'' But they also make the songs sound less spontaneous, and so do lyrics that strain toward Bob Dylan's oracular tone: ''When Great Satan is gone the Whore of Babylon /She just can't sustain the pressure where it's placed/She caves,'' Mr. Oberst sings in the folky shuffle of ''Four Winds.''

There are hints of private chronicles: rehab in ''Cleanse Song,'' an abortion in ''Lime Tree,'' the ''constant compromise'' of growing up in ''Middleman.'' Mr. Oberst still has aphoristic moments: in ''Soul Singer in a Session Band,'' he sings, ''I was a hopeless romantic/Now I'm just turning tricks.'' He is clearly searching for a more mature style. But the musical and rhetorical convolutions of ''Cassadaga'' are no substitute, yet, for the way he used to blurt things out. JON PARELES